“Are you sure you are well?” Dacia asked quietly, feeling through my body what I would not say.
“I’m just a little ill,” I said faintly. Despite the cool rain, a pale, sickly kind of sweat erupted on my brow.
“Louis,” Dacia called immediately.
The stern soldier turned immediately.
“Will you please let her ride? She’s been injured and is falling ill from being out in the weather. I can feel her trembling.”
“No!” I said to Dacia, for I wanted only to walk beside her. But she shrugged me off, handing me over to Louis.
“Hush, Salomé, you cannot walk in this state.”
I heard a few murmurs of complaint from the girls, but Louis set me sideways on the horse behind him as if I were Dacia’s luggage, then trotted back to the front of the group. I had to bury my scream in my arm as the jostling of the horse hit my thighs.
“Are you at least getting better rates?” Christine asked me at one point.
I blinked, trying to make sense of the question in my pain-addled brain.
“Josef had to raise the room rates because of the taxes,” one of the other girls explained. “It’s really the Baron’s …” But she trailed off, her gaze flicking to the soldiers.
Christine gave her a look like she’d just stepped in cow shit. “Josef isn’t here to hear you butter him up, but we are.”
“It’s about the same as it was,” I managed.
They accepted my answer, turning to a debate about expenses and taxes. It sounded as if they all owed more than before I’d left.
“What has happened in the village?” I asked. “Besides the taxes?”
“The Baron is restoring his estate. He’s pressed many of the meninto work and they are coming to the Blue Moon less and less. It’s not money. I think they are all just exhausted, between the fields and the walls and the dangers of the labor.”
“Lamont lost his fingers. Crushed by a stone,” another girl informed me. I had no recollection of who Lamont was.
“Lisette got the pox from one of the Baron’s soldiers,” another said.
“Is it better in your town? Colmar?”
“She’s a long way from Colmar.”
“Is Colmar still in the Baron’s territory?” someone whispered.
“He is an active lord,” Christine said with a lofty detachment she performed for men; the soldiers escorting them were the Baron’s men, after all. “We are so grateful for his wisdom and care.”
The others murmured agreement.
But they had said more than enough—between the Baron and Josef, their misery was acute. I gripped the back of the saddle and tried to hold back my tears. Without the hope of becoming a sorceress, I had no ability to help Dacia, or any of them. I would not be able to find Rochelle. Perchta’s hut would shelter me for a moment, but it would not give me what I wanted, what Ineeded. My fire, my bath, my bed. Power.Freedom. Why had I run? I could not remember.
The women began debating the directions for finding the altar, and eventually Louis set me down and trotted off into the woods, looking for the turnoff. Gratefully, I leaned onto Dacia, and we began to slowly shuffle forward.
“I am afraid for you, Salomé,” she said in low tones. “I missed you, but I wish we had not come across you like this.”
I pressed her arm, trying to comfort her without betraying a word.
“There were terrible rumors about you.” She glanced around us, as if to see if anyone was listening. “They think you killed Maxime. That you are a witch. That you crawled out of your own grave.”
I shook my head, which made it spin. “They are just stories,” I managed through the nausea.
“Of course, for here you are in the flesh.” She sighed. “But still …”
